Itsy Bitsy Foodies

In the past few years my family has gotten into grinding our own meat.  It all started with making chicken sausage for our Pizza Pasta using my Grandma’s old hand-crank meat grinder.  When that ran out of steam we upgraded to a Kitchen Aid attachment for our stand-up mixer and about that time we realized that grinding steaks is a simple process that produces restaurant-quality {or even better} hamburgers at home.  You don’t need to season the ground beef much, if at all, because the flavor of the meat itself is great.  And the burger is so tender it will melt in your mouth.

Apart from the incredible tenderness and superior flavor of freshly-ground beef, there are some health benefits, too.  When you purchase ground beef there’s a good chance it’s been ground in a meat-processing plant before being shipped to supermarkets around the country.  You don’t know anything about the quality or cut of meat.  More importantly, with so much meat going through the massive grinders at the factories and even at the supermarkets there is no way of knowing how long the meat has been in the grinder before being pushed through or how long since the grinder was cleaned.  Furthermore, when meat is ground there is more surface area that is exposed so the longer it sits before being used, the higher the risk of contamination.  These factors are what increase the risk of E-coli and other food-borne illnesses in ground beef.  This risk is greatly reduced when you grind your own meat because you see the steak(s) that will be ground, you know that the grinder is clean and you will most likely use the ground beef immediately.  With the reduced risk of E-coli you can cook your hamburgers more like you cook your steak.  Not having to overcook your burgers makes them extra tender and juicy.

As for the cut of meat to grind, you can grind any steak that you would like.  Sirloins, chuck and brisket are commonly used.  Some say that chuck makes the best burgers because it has the perfect ratio of fat to meat.  Most connoisseurs and restaurants have a bias for a certain steak or blend of steaks.  My family once ground some steaks separately to have a side-by-side burger sampling and I have to say that I couldn’t really tell a difference between the cuts of meat.  But I can definitely tell a difference between a freshly-ground burger and one that is made with pre-ground meat.

You don’t have to buy expensive cuts of meat to make great burgers.  We have made burgers with some of the cheapest and leanest cuts of steak with delicious results.  For the occasions when we’re in the mood for a “real” hamburger, not chicken or turkey, we will now always grind our own beef.

If you don’t have a meat grinder or simply don’t want to mess with the process, most butchers will gladly grind the steaks for you.

*{Grinding your own steaks is also great for taco meat, pasta sauces and any other ground beef dish.}